Academy Sports + Outdoors reported earnings this week for their quarter ended August 3rd, 2024. They were light on details specific to outdoor cooking, but had some good updates on their business overall.
Like every other retailer, they’re feeling the pain from a pressured consumer. Also, like other retailers, are still seeing success with new and innovative products.
First, we’ve talked about leaning into customer behavior, focusing on value, and making sure we got the right prices during the key promotional time periods, and we need to win market share, winning in the newness and innovation as the customer really is buying that, almost agnostic of price.
Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports
An area that Academy is as aggressive as any retailer for growth is with store openings. They continue to expand their geography, and then once they do that, they try till fill in the area with more coverage.
They recently moved into Ohio, as they’ve expanded north. They plan to open another Ohio location this fall, then several more in the near future.
During the quarter, we opened one new location in Zanesville, Ohio, and early release from the store is strong. This is our first store in Ohio, expanding the Academy brand to 19 states.
Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports
As we’ve discussed previously, our goal is to quickly build density in these new markets after we enter them, so you’ll see our second Ohio store open up this fall with several others planned for 2025 and 2026.
DoorDash Partnership
We saw that both Home Depot and Lowe’s recently added new deliver services through partnerships. Academy also has added that capability as they’ve started a partnership with DoorDash.
It’s still early but they see the partnership as being accretive to their business and appealing to more customers.
While it is still early days and the contribution level is still low, we’re encouraged by the performance of some of our new capabilities, such as same-day delivery powered by DoorDash. Our initial analysis of the DoorDash data indicates that the business generated through this platform is accretive due to it attracting both a younger customer, along with customers who tend to live in more dense urban city centers where we don’t have a large brick-and-mortar presence.
Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports
While DoorDash should be beneficial to the business year round, it could shape up to be especially helpful during the holiday season. Same-day delivery extends the shopping calendar for Academy.
And what I think we’re really excited about is if you think about that holiday time period, you’ve been into that 18th or 19th of December, where people stop trying to ship those because they’re not — they’re afraid that it’s not going to get delivered on time. We now have the capability to offer same-day delivery on that, and I think it’s really going to help us in those last five to six days heading into Christmas. So those are the initiatives that I think get us from the low end of the guidance to the higher end of the guidance.
Steve Lawrence, CEO of Academy Sports